City Exists Just In The Mind Of The Beholder, Scientists Find

January 26, 1986|By Daniel Goleman, New York Times News Service.

NEW YORK — In a sense, social scientists find, the city does not exist. There is no such single entity, but rather many cities, as many as there are people to experience them. And researchers now believe that the subjective reality is every bit as important to understanding and fostering successful urban life as the concrete and asphalt of objective measurement.

Although most earlier approaches to assessing the quality of city life led researchers to consider such factors as noise levels and density, the new work shows how people actually perceive their environments is as important as the environments themselves.

``The images that people hold in their minds reflect multiple realities,`` says Edward Krupat, a social psychologist at the forefront of the new approach.

The studies have profound implications both for city dwellers and for city planners and administrators, in leading more contented lives and in designing and operating cities. Spurred by the research, urban planners and architects are using techniques that anticipate, in the planning stages, varying human reactions to a project. Computer simulations of walks or drives through developments are being used, for example, to test reactions to design options.

The studies indicate, too, that a mayor, for example, can no longer assume that the city he perceives that he is running is quite the same as the one his voters think they live in.

Among the areas most actively investigated at present are how children`s mental maps change as their minds mature, how people`s images of a place reflect the level of crime there and how people`s images of their

neighborhoods affect the success of redevelopment.

The usefulness of the new approach has been brought home by such studies as one finding that the likelihood of being robbed was 20 times greater in Washington than in Milwaukee, but Milwaukee residents felt only slightly safer than Washingtonians.

``If a person believes a place is unsafe, it makes little difference that there is no danger by all objective indicators: He will not go there,`` Krupat said. In a sense, part of the city ceases to exist for that person.

The potency of people`s images of their surroundings was shown in a study of tenant groups who had received money to restore run-down and partly abandoned apartment buildings in Harlem. The researchers found that a group`s success depended partly on whether some tenants had positive memories of the past in that part of the city.

``The older people, particularly the women who had an image of Harlem based on the 1920s and 1930s, were the glue that held together the groups that were successful in restoring the buildings,`` said Susan Saegert, a psychologist at the City University of New York graduate center, who studied the rehabilitation effort.

The subjective nature of the city is evident in mental maps people create of cities they inhabit. Certainly the most famous mental map is that of the world as seen from New York City, drawn by the cartoonist Saul Steinberg for a cover of the New Yorker magazine. His map showed the West Side of the city in great detail, and beyond it a virtually empty America with a few sparse landmarks, such as Chicago. Any New Yorker can testify that this perception of the world is common here.

In their research, psychologists are asking people to draw similar mental maps. These freehand drawings are full of distortions and blind spots, but it is these very inaccuracies that psychologists find so valuable. They offer a sort of urban Rorschach, an insight into the personal meanings and experiences a person finds in a city.

``The images of those sections of the city that people use most and with which they are most familiar are more complete and fine-grained, while people may be barely aware of the existence of other sections,`` according to Krupat, whose book ``People in Cities`` (Cambridge University Press) reviews much of the recent research.

The study of people`s mental maps of the city was pioneered by Kevin Lynch, an urban planner who sought a way to analyze the key elements of a city. The drawings, he found, were highly personalized, but could be combined in terms of certain basic elements. These included major travel routes like rail lines or streets; city districts, such as SoHo, recognized as having a common character; and landmarks, especially notable elements such as the Empire State Building or Grand Central Station.

Urban planners have used the technique to analyze and compare cities. In one study, for example, residents of Los Angeles, Boston and Jersey City were asked to draw their cities. Boston was found to evoke detailed images, while Los Angeles and Jersey City were found to have few distinctive features in people`s minds.